Courier Friends to Follow

WIC open house on Fort Stewart

Special to the Courier

POSTED:July 25, 2011 1:29 p.m.

The Liberty County Health Department’s new Women, Infants and Children clinic on Fort Stewart will have an open house from 1-4 p.m. Thursday, and military families are welcome to attend. There will be tours of the building, refreshments and activities for children. The 3,024-square-foot clinic houses office space, a nutrition education room, breastfeeding room, laboratory and two waiting rooms. “All of the services that were available before are now being offered in a larger, much nicer facility,” Coastal Health District Nutrition Services Director Tonya Scott said. “WIC is an extremely important program that provides our military families with beneficial nutrition assistance.” A dedication plaque will be presented during the open house to honor military families for their faithful service to the United States. “The Women, Infant and Children’s program provides an invaluable service to our family members, and the opening of this new clinic is yet another way Fort Stewart/HAAF is working with our local communities to care for military families,” Garrison Commander Col. Kevin Milton said. WIC is a federally funded nutrition education program. The program’s mission is to provide supplemental food, nutrition education, social service and health referrals to income-eligible pregnant or postpartum women, infants and children up to age 5 to improve their health outcomes. Many studies have concluded that for every dollar spent on pregnant women enrolled in the WIC program, between $1.77 and $3.13 in Medicaid costs were saved over the first 60 days after childbirth. The Fort Stewart WIC clinic – located at 441 W. Bultman Ave., building 1183 – is open from 7:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information, call the clinic at 877-3330.